Connecting with God through poetic articulations of lived, embodied experience–engaging texts from the Revised Common Lectionary for Christian churches, other biblical and spiritual texts, and evocations of the divine in rituals and other public events–always accepting lived reality as a primary source of divine revelation and mystery.

Standing Up in the Hard Places

Reflection in response to Proper 16, 14th Sunday after Pentecost, Year C (focus on Luke: 13:10-17)

The bent over woman stood up straight, praising God, when Jesus touched her, erasing her long disfigurement, and people in the synagogue rejoiced. Scholars agree Jesus did not violate halakhah, the compilation of Jewish law governing worship, even as Luke records objection by the synagogue leader. Rules often help communities to be strong, orderly, but leaders, not just in synagogues to be sure, can confuse order they want with order God wants— not always the same. When health, liberation, mercy, are at stake, as then, like now, the rules enabling those outcomes control. But do really follow those rules all the time? If we did, would health care and prisons be run for profit, would anyone be allowed to carry firearms in school, would we then allow God’s creation to be spoiled by greed, dictators to fire poison at their people, officers to shoot Black men just because they can, Palestinians to be denied their own true homeland?

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It is tempting to leave Jesus back there in synagogue, upending the claim of power by the leader, feeling all righteous, critical, about the leader then, instead of hearing our Lord here and now, saying about rules of today, Stop! Indeed laying holy hands on victims of health care and prison profit rules so they, and more importantly we, can stand straight and throw off the tyranny keeping them bent down. And he, then as now, weeping not only over Jerusalem— but also the earth despoiled by our careless selfishness, children at risk in school, brave citizens gassed by their own leaders, our streets war zones where peace officers shoot first, ask later— he touches us as he touched the crippled woman so that finally we can take his power, his love, his peace from the sanctuary where we too often embalm it into the world that too is bent over, crippled, crying out in pain, and need.

There is hope, yes, always hope, but its wealth cannot be shared if we do not follow him in breaking the rules of oppression and keeping rules that liberate. Jesus asks us to go to the hard places, and stand up.

About this poem…..The text does not say it, but the synagogue ruler was probably a Pharisee, and it is so easy to poke not only fun but also righteous judgment at them—forgetting our own Pharisaic ways, and our own resort to rules to keep order rather than freedom and liberation. This incident is not intended to be about people long ago so much as it is a caution to us. Can we overcome rules of today—stuff we breathe so much we cannot see its effect, like thinking “for profit” means better care, that authorities must know what they are doing, that guns save lives, that the survival of one people is more important than the survival of another?